Your Development Partner

Ridgetop Group has a staff of highly experienced engineers along with the tools to provide design services for critical IP and PCB-based designs. For application-specific ICs (ASICs), these designs can include analog, digital, mixed-signal and gate array designs of varying process nodes of 0.5 down to 28nm.

Recent designs have included radiation-hardened (rad hard) high speed ADCs, DACs, and precision, in-situ test structures. The designs include complex devices incorporating signal conditioning, on-board memory, and many other stages. Board-level designs have included laser rangefinder instruments, data memory modules for commercial aircraft, and subsea electronics with certification to FAA DO-178B and DO-254 also available.

Ridgetop focuses on high-reliability designs, which leverages our experience in project management, design centering and test program development. Endeavors include mission-critical designs for aerospace and defense, medical and telecom applications.

In addition to a highly trained personnel, Ridgetop maintains a full suite of advanced EDA analog and mixed-signal design tools, including design simulation, layout and parasitic extraction. Alternately, we can use your tools for full compatibility and technology transfer.

Types of Design

Our design capabilities span ‘design from scratch’, to rescaling ‘legacy’ designs to smaller process geometries.

Ridgetop also completes the back-end design cycle from existing EDIF/SPICE schematic-level to GDSII layouts. Ridgetop has wide experience in designing ICs using a variety of foundries, some of which include:

• IBM
• AMI
• American Semiconductor
• TSMC
• UMC
• Peregrine Semiconductor

In addition, we implement FPGA-based designs from basic specification, to developing gate-level designs, performing timing analysis, and programming the FPGA. We also implement complex DSP algorithms.

In some cases, Ridgetop can add prognostic cells or built-in self test (BIST) objects to the legacy designs. This can improve testability and minimize mean time to repair (MTTR) on deployed systems that incorporate the ICs.

Design Services

Ridgetop has a staff of experienced engineers dedicated to solving difficult challenges on behalf of our customers. Our expertise extends to:

Semiconductor and IC Design

Ridgetop has delivered designs using various electronic design automation (EDA) too flows (e.g., Cadence, Mentor, Silvaco, Tanner). Ridgetop also has a line of pre-designed and characterized IP blocks called InstaCell™ that can be used as-is or customized to accelerate the time-to-market for your systems. Examples include precision bandgap references, op-amps, comparators, ADCs, DACs and test structures.

Ridgetop has also developed IC-level IP for rad-hard applications for the U.S. Government (e.g., NASA, Air Force, Department of Energy) and commercial companies. We use by rad-hard by design (RHBD) and rad-hard by process (RHBP) techniques to meet radiation hardness goals.

PCB Board-Level Design

Ridgetop has provided board-level designs for its customers, including laser rangefinder components, and data memory modules (DMM) that are DO-178B compliant for commercial aerospace firms.

Test System Load Boards, ATE Programming, and Defect Analysis

Ridgetop Europe has extensive ATE experience in precision current measurement applications, including Iddq, as well as ATE system programming and customer test fixture design and development. Installations have been made at over 70 semiconductor firms worldwide.

Radiation-Hardened (Rad-Hard) ICs

Ridgetop has designed ICs to be radiation-hardened against Total Ionizing Dose (TID), Transient Dose Rate (TDR), and Single Event Effects (SEE). Ridgetop has applied methods of Rad-Hard by Design (RHBD) and Rad-Hard by Process (RHBP) to achieve specialized levels of tolerance.

Click here to learn more about Ridgetop’s design services.